Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Hey Everyone! Sorry to be writing so late this week! Things have been absolutely crazy since this transfer began. I could probably write a whole email just about what we were doing on Monday that made us so busy didn't have time to take p-day. It's been fun though. Elder Miranda and I have had some pretty cool stuff happen since last Monday.

The week started off pretty slow. A couple of lessons. A lot of finding. Then Friday came along, and things just exploded. We went over to a college in our area and did some finding over there, but there was almost nobody on the streets. We literally only talked with about a dozen people over the course of an hour, which is strange because we were so close to a college. But, out of those dozen people, one of them became an investigator. That was pretty exciting. After that we were supposed to meet up with the missionaries from the next area over and have a lesson with them and one of their investigators who's moving to Ushiku, but after we rode the train over there, we got a call from them telling us that he cancelled. Well, not much we can do about that, so we turned around and went home.

So, for this next one, I need to explain that Elder Miranda just came from an area called Oizumi, and there are a lot of Brazilians out there. And when I say alot, I mean the missionaries there proselyte in Portuguese. So, when he came to Ushiku, Elder Miranda said that he wanted to find some Brazilians out here to teach. We've already got the Comba family, but we decided to go look for some more. So on Saturday I took him out to an area where we had found a couple of Brazilians before. They always live in clusters, so I figured there should be more around there somewhere. We started looking, and wouldn't you know it, we managed to find a few. One of them was a woman with a young child, and she started telling us about how when she was a young girl back in Brazil, her mom had met with the missionaries, but she didn't remember much about it. She then somehow ended up in Japan, and now here we are. She's going to come to church and bring her husband with her. Awesome. Later that night we had a lesson with the Comba family, and Elder Miranda gets along great with Brother Comba. I'm really excited to continue working with them now that Elder Miranda is here and he can teach them in Portuguese.

Sunday after church we went out and did some finding. We decided to go knock on doors, and ended up finding a couple of guys from Napal that we set up lessons with. I'm not really sure how we're gonna pull that off, because their English is terrible, and their Japanese is even worse. But, we shall see. We ordered a couple of Book of Mormons in Hindi, so once those get here that should help out a lot. Hopefully we can get them to stick around long enough for the books to get here. Later in the afternoon, around 3 or so, we got a call from Brother Okubo in the ward. He told us to come over to his house at 6:30, because he was having a "gyoza party". He had mentioned it to us earlier at church and said that he was having this gyoza party, and I thought he was just being funny. If you knew Brother Okubo, you would understand. He's always making wierd jokes. Anyway, he calls us, and tells us to come over at 6:30. I then said to him, "oh, that wasn't a joke. You were being serious." He starts laughing and says of course not! Well, we went over, and found out that when Brother Okubo says "gyoza party", what he means is that we're going to have dinner with him and his wife, and there's going to be so many gyoza you can't hope to possibly eat them all. After returning to the apartment with a full (but somewhat distressed) belly, we called it a night.

I could tell you about what happened on Monday, but then I probably wouldn't have anything to write about next week, so I'll leave it here for now. I hope everyone is doing well! Take care!